Perhaps it would have been interesting to meet the likes of Somerset Maugham (if indeed he was the kind of man Allen describes), but his fiction, in almost all ways unremarkable, is another matter entirely.

Viewed from this historical perspective, our current temperature history is relatively unremarkable, which is why Mann and Gore had to distort it to make their case, and add the GCMs at the end of the historic record to accentuate it.